Facebook Connect error bug temporarily crashes popular websites

A Facebook glitch briefly took down a large number of sites that use the social network’s login credentials on Thursday.

On Thursday, visitors to major websites like CNN, Yelp, Gawker, CNN, Mashable and MSNBC.com were sent to redirect pages almost immediately upon loading, ultimately landing on an error page inside of the Facebook website. It is being suggested that it is the fault of Facebook Connect, wherein visitors can “like” a post on a page while logged into Facebook, or comment using their Facebook credentials.

Facebook Connect bug takes down popular sites,

A spokesperson for the social network said in a statement:

“For a short period of time, there was a bug that redirected people logging in with Facebook from third-party sites to Facebook.com. The issue was quickly resolved, and Login with Facebook is now working as usual.”

The issue lasted about 30 minutes or less, according to what we can gather from when users tweeted about the problem. Users who were not logged into Facebook were not affected. The issue also did not cause any problems for Facebook’s own domain.